Samsung Bixby Assistant is coming to TVs, washing machine and other appliances: Report

With Bixby onboard, all Samsung appliances will speak a common language.

Samsung Bixby, the digital voice assistant from the South Korean company, will become a year old assistant next month. Since its launch alongside Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ in 2017, the assistant has not been off to a great start, and has been hit with multiple technical issues.

Samsung first failed to make Bixby voice feature available at the time of launch, and then its roll out was hit due to lack of speech synthesis and training data. In comparison with other assistants, Bixby is also limited in terms of language support and is only available in Korean, English and Chinese. However, Samsung envisions its assistant being a central feature among all of its consumer electronic devices.

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At CES 2018 last month, Samsung revealed its first smart refrigerator with Bixby assistant built-in. Now, the company is said to be bringing it to more devices including Smart TV and smart washing machine, BusinessKorea reports. The move will widely benefit the assistant since it will have more voice data and queries to train it neural networks and machine learning algorithms.

Bixby as an assistant is definitely not bad and on smartphones, it has deep integration with apps which even Google Assistant and Siri lack at this moment. However, the adoption of Bixby is stalled by the fact that Google’s Assistant and Siri are widely available on other devices and Samsung’s own smartphones include Google Assistant as part of Android operating system.

While Bixby might not be a hit on smartphones, it has a chance to succeed in the home appliances segment. With Bixby on other electronic devices, Samsung is eying the Internet of Things segment where it has keen interest with its SmartThings brand. By integrating Bixby into all of its smart devices, Samsung will be able to program them to better communicate with each other and also allow them to be controlled via a single console on your smartphone or tablet.

Samsung is expected to announce Bixby 2.0 alongside the launch of Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ at MWC 2018 later this month. The new version will have tighter integration with Samsung’s other consumer and IoT devices. However, it needs to be noted that Samsung will be pushing Bixby further without a key figure.

Injong Rhee, Samsung CTO has left the company after heading its Bixby and Knox security efforts to join Google. His move will definitely benefit Google but Samsung has not shared details of his successor and where its AI and machine learning efforts are now headed.